Web cookies don’t taste as good as real cookies
Q: Someone told me that a web site was storing information about me by using cookies. What are cookies?
A: As much as I’d love to tell you that the cookies you are referring to are those yummy oatmeal raisin ones you find at the grocery store, sadly they are not.
The cookies, in your case, are very small data files that reside on your computer. These data files contain information that helps a web site remember such things as your login name, site preferences or in some instances, the items in your shopping cart.
If you have used a login page on a web site with a little box that you can click that says “Remember me”, the web site is most likely remembering you by storing your user name in a cookie. The next time you come back to the web site, the web site checks for the existence of that cookie on your computer and if it finds it, it automatically populates the user name on the web page with the user name it stored in the cookie.
Unfortunately, cookies can also be used to track your browsing history on a web site which many feel is a violation of their privacy. This is why you now see options in many of the popular Internet browsers that give you the choice to allow or disable cookies for specific web sites.
This post was originally broadcast Friday, May 18, 2007 on Tech Talk with Noobie, a weekly radio show on WCBK 102.3 FM in Martinsville, Indiana. Tech Talk with Noobie airs every Friday between 11:30 a.m. and noon. If you have a question you would like Noobie to answer on the air, simply e-mail your question to .
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